The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Book 4

The Passage of Power is the fourth volume of Robert A. Caro's massive political biography The Years of Lyndon Johnson. This volume is an extremely uneven work: where it is good, it is great, and wonderfully well-documented; but where it is not good, it sometimes descends to bad history, bad biography, very bad political interpretation and purple prose.Caro succeeds in his purpose: to rehabilitate LBJ historically ' as a statesman, but not as a nice guy. This is a most difficult task. For many of us, LBJ was a crooked President whose major "contribution" was the war in Southeast Asia. Over 58,000 of us killed, 153,000 of us wounded, 1,672 of us missing ' to say nothing of the well over one million Vietnamese who died in the war. We despised President Johnson.Caro had planned a four-volume biography; but he decided to split the final volume into two volumes. In light of Caro's purpose, this division makes good sense. The book ends with LBJ at the height of his success and power. The book does well to stop there, before Johnson ruined his presidency with his inveterate lying, and the Vietnam War. The Passage of Power has five main focuses: LBJ's half-hearted effort to run against John F. Kennedy for the Democratic nomination, LBJ's time as Vice-President, the time of JFK's assassination, LBJ's assumption of the presidency and the first seven weeks of his presidency, and through almost all of it runs the theme of the Kennedys and the hatred between Johnson and the brothers.For me, Caro's book rises to greatness when Johnson becomes President. I had never appreciated LBJ's commitment to civil rights. Nor had I had any awareness of the almost insuperable obstacles Johnson had to overcome to get Civil Rights approved by Congress. Nor had I any appreciation of the time constraints Johnson faced. And no idea whatsoever of the brilliant and tough-minded maneuvers and pressures that he applied. He knew the Senators ' really understood them. Caro, by dint of many interviews and massive research delineates all of this.Johnson was hated, or disliked, or not trusted by the Senate liberals. So when he got behind the Civil Rights bill, the liberals generally saw LBJ as just piggy-backing on JFK, the popular President who had haplessly submitted the bill that was doomed to failure. Almost no one thought it would become law. The main opposition to the bill came from the solid bloc of southern Senators, a group which, though a minority, understood how to successfully block legislation they did not like. And they most certainly did not like civil rights! So Johnson set out, first, to get the liberals to act effectively for the bill. The liberal Senate leader, Hubert Humphrey recalled that Johnson called him to the Oval Office. Johnson told him, "You have this great opportunity now, Hubert, but you liberals will never deliver. You don't know the rules of the Senate, and your liberal friends will be off making speeches when they ought to be present." (p. 563) This lit a fire under Humphrey: he learned the rules and organized the liberals.Johnson and Humphrey handled the Republican leader Everett Dirkson very differently. He was given the spotlight, hailed as a great statesman; and this vocal opponent of civil rights, this Senator who had fought so hard to kill the bill in committee, caved in and voted for civil rights! Other Senators Johnson bought with promises of Federal projects in their states. Still others he threatened with loss of Federal projects.But there is much, much more to Johnson's getting the civil rights bill passed, and his getting the budget approved, and his getting foreign aid approved ' far too much for me to describe in this review. Caro delves into the details, and convinces.Caro rises above mere presentation of historical evidence. He makes his tale interesting, exciting. Caro at his best is a great political biographer/historian.However, the book has some negative aspects. Perhaps the most obvious is Caro's practice of pouring out purple prose, where it is unnecessary or inappropriate. There are too many pages of this stuff; and a large part of it is repetitive. Again and again, Caro flogs to death the subject of LBJ's early life of poverty. He goes on at great length about JFK's coffin, about Jackie's blood-stained dress. And Caro's description of news camera coverage of the assassination and aftermath was well described by Alexander Pope: that "like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along." My impression is that about fifty pages of meaningless verbiage, if excised, would not be missed.About halfway through this book, I had to set it aside for three days. I was sickened at the rotten men we had elected to be our leaders. This was a personal reaction, which I hope most readers would not experience.The most egregious fault with The Passage of Power is Caro's fascination with the Kennedys. Caro's long, detailed description of JFK and PT-109 is in itself superb; but it does not really belong in a biography of LBJ. Other Kennedy stories claim more than enough space. The Cuban missile crisis gets a great deal of attention from Caro. Caro lavishes extravagant praise upon Robert Kennedy: during the crisis, he was "a master of compromise, of diplomacy, of diplomacy with a moral element, of diplomacy that was, in fact, in some ways grounded in 'the moral question'; there was the insistence that 'a sneak attack is not in our traditions,' that America was not 'that kind of a country.'" (p. 239) But Caro's own book shows that if we had indeed attacked Cuba at that time it would have been no "sneak attack." In this crisis, Johnson made one of his very few efforts to influence Kennedy: he wanted the USA to drive the Russians out of Cuba. When Khrushchev demanded that we withdraw our missiles from Turkey, in exchange for Russia removing their missiles from Cuba, Caro says that the Kennedys were quick to grab at that. Johnson objected, on the grounds that if we backed down in Eastern Europe, the Western European nations would regard NATO as an empty shell, and the result would be that most of Europe would go Communist. LBJ also predicted that yielding to this demand would only inspire Khrushchev to make further demands. The Kennedys saw that LBJ was right about us losing Europe; but they dared not refuse the demand. So they secretly offered to remove our missiles from Turkey in about six months, so that it would not be so apparent that we were caving in. But before they could close the deal, Khrushchev sent another letter, making the further demands that Johnson had foreseen. Kennedy's "Brilliant" solution was to ignore the second letter, and go ahead with the offer to get the missiles out of Turkey. Of course this resolved nothing. It was not until our naval blockade of Cuba ' supported by the swelling public demand that we either attack Cuba of bomb it ' that Khrushchev backed down. In the course of the crisis, Caro shows our administration declaring several deadlines and backing away from each of them. Caro also states that LBJ was excluded from the later meetings dealing with the crisis.The careful reader may wonder whether the praise is justified. Caro tells us that Joseph Kennedy, the father of the brothers was one of the diplomats who, along with the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, appeased Hitler. Caro says the the brothers, especially RFK, were very much influenced by their father. The careful reader might infer that JFK and RFK might have leaned toward appeasement. Caro says that LBJ called Joseph Kennedy "a Chamberlain umbrella man," and seems even to have referred to him as a Nazi. Caro also says that LBJ's assessment of Kennedy senior absolutely infuriated RFK.Here is where Caro is guilty of some really bad historical omission. Caro touches briefly on the failed Bay of Pigs counterrevolutionary invasion of Cuba. But he does not tell us that JFK countermanded the order to provide US naval air support for the invasion. This created the worst of all possible worlds: the invasion went ahead, plenty of people were killed, the invasion was doomed to fail, and the United States, with egg on its face was perceived by the world to be weak.Next in this omitted chronology is that in Vienna, JFK talked an uncompromising line. So Khrushchev decided to test Kennedy. Through the East German puppets, Russia strung up a barbed wire fence through Berlin, separating the Russian zone from th US/British/French zone. This directly violated the four-power agreement, and Khrushchev was prepared to back down. When the US did nothing, said nothing, the East Germans went ahead and built the Berlin Wall. CARO DOES NOT EVEN MENTION THE BERLIN WALL! Nor , of course does Caro suggest that LBJ would have seen JFK's inaction as pusillanimous appeasement.Caro devotes plenty of space to the Kennedys, so his omission of the Berlin wall was a conscious decision. The sequence of events ' Bay of Pigs, Vienna talks, Berlin Wall, Russian missiles in Cuba ' suggests that Khrushchev saw JFK as weak ' much weaker than Truman or Eisenhower. Moreover, LBJ might not have been an expert on foreign relations, but, as Caro showed in earlier volumes, LBJ sure knew how to play poker. And he wanted to call Khrushchev's bluff.Only by glossing over the Bay of Pigs, and by complete silence on the Berlin Wall, can Caro hope to get away with his fulsome praise of the Kennedys, and JFK's "sure touch amounting to diplomatic genius" in the Cuba missile crisis.Getting back to what Caro DID write, and his conclusions therefrom. . . . Caro states that RFK could not stand liars, and that he despised Johnson because he would lie "even when he didn't have to." [true, true] But the same Caro who thus praises RFK does show us how RFK misled LBJ regarding the Vice-Presidency. He shows RFK demanding of Chester Bowles, in the presence of JFK, that Bowles lie by stating pubilcly the falsehood that he had supported th Bay of Pigs invasion.Also, of RFK, the moral diplomat who said we were not the kind of country to make a "sneak attack" ' Caro also pretty much insists that RFK was responsible for eight separate attempts to secretly assassinate Fidel Castro. What kind of country is that? Caro says that RFK went into a prolonged depression because he felt that his actions had resulted in his brother's assassination.To end the topic of Caro admiring JFK and RFK in the bio of LBJ, Caro wrote that RFK had a soft, gentle side that he successfully concealed. It reminds me of th villain in "Oklahoma," Jud Fry. Curly is singing (Pore Jud is Daid): He loved everything and everybody in the world Only . . . only he never let on And nobody ever knowed itBy now you probably wonder why I rate The Passage of Power at four stars. It's because it's impossible to give a book six stars and one star.Caro really does a great job with the beginning of LBJ's presidency. Heavy-handed, basset-faced LBJ accomplished in a few weeks what the "graceful, witty, incandescent personality" of JFK and all his bright, beautiful Camelot failed to perform in three years. (P. 588, Caro quoting Schlesinger) But not only accomplishment! Transcendent vision! The Great Society, soaring far above anything the Kennedy crowd ever proposed. Complete with programs to get us started on the road to ending poverty and other ills which afflict America. Wow!Caro makes a wise decision to end this book with LBJ at the height of success. Otherwise the successes would have disappeared in the book as some of them ' for example, the "Great Society" ' disappeared in real life, sunk in the Big Muddy of the war in Southeast Asia.

"It was Abraham Lincoln who `struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy's sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life."The Passage of Power, the fourth volume in Caro's projected five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, covers from the 1960 presidential primaries through the first seven weeks of Johnson's presidency. It covers the shortest, but also the most interesting, period of time of any of the books yet. The Passage of Power is divided into five parts: Johnson v. Kennedy 1960 (the 1960 democratic nomination fight), "Rufus Cornpone" (Johnson's vice presidency), Dallas (the assassination of Kennedy), Taking Command (Johnson's actions in the days immediately following the assassination), and To Become a President (the rest of the first seven weeks of Johnson's presidency).The Years of Lyndon Johnson has always been thematically about power. The period covered by The Passage of Power is particularly appropriate for a study of power. Johnson went from perhaps the second most powerful man in America to a figure of ridicule at Georgetown dinner parties to the most powerful man in the world in just a few years. Caro has always had a flair for the dramatic, and he fully employs it to demonstrate just how jarring the shifts of Johnson's power were.A powerful Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, Johnson perhaps had reason to be confident about his chances at the 1960 democratic nomination. But he was quickly outmaneuvered by Kennedy (Caro also asserts Johnson was almost paralyzed by fear of failure), and the vice presidential nomination was soon all he had left to hope for. Serving as Majority Leader with a president of the same party in the White House was much less enticing, and Johnson was fully aware that the vice presidency had served as a gateway to the presidency for many men. And after all, "power is where power goes." But it was not to be. Whether due to Johnson's uncharacteristic ineptness at grasping for power, a lack of respect in the administration from the Kennedy men, or fear of Johnson as a political rival (the views of the most important actor, John F. Kennedy, will never be fully known), Johnson quickly became a weak Vice President even by historical standards, kept out of the loop on major crises like the Bay of Pigs and James Meredith incidents (Johnson was kept completely in the dark) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (firmly on the side of the hawks, Johnson was not privy to the smaller meetings that actually determined Kennedy's response).Johnson's attempts at retaining relevance were also thwarted by the hatred of Kennedy's closest advisor, his brother Bobby. Caro paints a portrait of two men were both very different (Bobby patrician and principled, Johnson plebeian and pragmatic) and very much alike (both combining political ruthlessness with genuine compassion for the downtrodden). Bobby Kennedy comes away looking the worse in Caro's telling; for example, he torpedoed promising efforts by Johnson to get more involved in civil rights.The public view of Kennedy's assassination has always been firmly focused on Kennedy. Caro takes great pains to show just how precarious a position Johnson was thrust into. In the midst of the Cold War (and shortly after it almost got very hot), the American president was killed by a man with questionable ties to our enemies. Thrust into the presidency was a man hated by Kennedy's closest advisor, openly mocked by members of his administration, and consciously kept in the dark about matters of vital import (which is I think really a rather significant black mark against Kennedy). It is taken as a matter of course that presidential transitions occur without a hitch in this country because they always have, but never has that been put to a greater test than when Kennedy was killed. And on top of all the above, it all played out on television in front of an entire nation. (It should be noted that Caro explicitly states that in interviewing dozens of key figures and reading thousands of source documents he found no hint that Johnson had any foreknowledge of the assassination or was in any way involved.)But Johnson was, as his wife described him, "a good man in a tight spot," and despite being shut out of power for three years, was not stranger to its use. He calmed the nation in a public address (even though big speeches had always been his greatest weakness as a politician), convinced key aides and cabinet members from Kennedy's administration to stay for the near future, and began moving forward with Kennedy's legislative agenda. And moving forward how. The Kennedy faction has always maintained that Kennedy's agenda would have inevitably been passed had he not been killed, but Caro thoroughly dismantles their arguments as only Caro can. Not only had Kennedy been unable to make any progress on his agenda in three years, he had firmly positioned it for failure by putting the Southern senators in a position to hold key bills hostage to his civil rights bill. His key economic advisors foolishly thought Senator Byrd's requirement of a federal budget under $100MM was a "nice to have." But Johnson knew the Southern senators and knew Senator Byrd in particular. The federal budget was reduced to well under $100MM (actually reducing both federal spending and employee headcount), the held-up appropriation bills were passed, and Kennedy's marquee tax bill was passed. Juggling those with the civil rights bill, Johnson shepherded it through the Senate as perhaps only that old master of the Senate could.Johnson's first order of business was continuity, but it didn't take him long to put his stamp on his presidency. A state visit by the German Chancellor was held in rural Texas with a brisket and spare rib buffet line. Reporters visiting Johnson's ranch were treated to horseback rides. And Johnson declared a War on Poverty. Not in the tones of a Boston aristocrat, but as only a man who had really lived poverty could.The source material of The Passage of Power has been picked over at an order of magnitude far beyond that of the first three volumes. That presents Caro with certain difficulties he had not earlier had, as he more often relies on quotes. Because this is so much a story of Kennedy v. Johnson, the two warring camps have tended to give their conflicting versions and stuck to them, leaving no real way to nail down the truth. Many more call-backs to the previous books are also made. Caro's trademark style is left somewhat hobbled (and having recently read The Power Broker, it seems that Caro's style has become muted over the years). But Caro is still Caro, and his prose should remain the envy of his fellow popular historians.Caro's feelings toward Johnson are understandably complex, and his treatment of Johnson has vacillated from volume to volume based on how he feels about Johnson's actions during that period. To Caro, the Johnson of The Passage of Power was Johnson at his best; it was "a moment not only masterful but, in its way, heroic." His leadership and liberal principles were on full display, and his abusiveness and deceit were (temporarily) held in check. Johnson comes off very well here, particularly to a reader who hasn't read the first three volumes. The great divide between the Kennedy and Johnson factions leaves a historian with little choice but to pick between the two, and Caro usually comes down on the side of the Johnson men. But he by no means gives Johnson a pass. He shows Johnson's nastier strong-arm tactics and makes a convincing case that Illinois wasn't the only state stolen in the 1960 election--Johnson helped Kennedy steal Texas too.Reference material takes up 32% of the Kindle version. They include Debts (acknowledgements), a very extensive Note on Sources (including five and a half pages just listing people Caro interviewed), a bibliography of Books Cited in Notes, Notes, an Index (linked back to the main text), Illustration Credits (linked back), Illustrations, a Note About the Author, and a list of books Also by Robert A. Caro. Caro doesn't use endnotes for his Notes (instead using a few per chapter for parentheticals and supras to his earlier books), but they are linked back to the main text from the Notes. The illustrations show up clearly in black and white and include the iconic photo of Johnson being sworn in on Air Force One.

Uma colecção gloriosa sobre Lyndon Johnson e a história dos EUA. Recomendo vivamente!

4th volume of the award-winning biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Maybe slightly less gripping than the previous volumes but still a masterly biography.

Yes, it is long. Yes, it is not a casual read. Yes, it helps to have read the previous volumes (as I have...nah, nah, na, NAA, na!) but Robert Caro has done it again. This is a brilliant snapshot of Washington politics and backstage manouering as we are likely to get this year. Or most other years. This volume covers Johnson leaving his post as Senate Majority Leader for the Vice-Presidency and his soon realising he has made a huge mistake. Tragically the crack of Lee Harvey Oswald's rifle in Dallas saves Johnson from the nothingness of the Veep's non-role in governmental affairs and ironically saves LBJ's career but OMG what a story!And let it be said here and now this book has the best explanation of Bobby Kennedy and LBJ's longstanding feud you will ever but ever read. Caro also goes to great lengths to explain how Bobby Kennedy, a most prickly and unlikeable undergraduate while studying at the Univ of Virginia, became the warm-hearted Senate visionary Democrats still weep over today.This is a great work, a terrific book. It will stand tall through the ages and be used in schools for years and years. Any American interested in how we got to where we are in the early 21st century should read this.

It's not often I wish I could give a book more than 5 stars. This is a superbly written, nuanced account of 5 crucial years in the life of Lyndon Johnson and, indeed, in the life of the United States, some of them better known as the Kennedy years. Caro gives us political biography as political thriller - there were times when, as with Mantel's Wolf Hall, although I knew what was going to happen, it felt as though I didn't. And Caro is so very, very good at psychological analysis - I was going to say we get a warts and all portrayal, but Caro actually goes beyond even that to show Lyndon Johnson in all his human complexity. It is difficult to believe that a book about this so over-told period in American history, with so much detailed information on political manoeuvring, a 600+ page book on such a short period, could be so engrossing, so absorbing that when you look up from it, you have to reorientate yourself. I lived through the LBJ years and brought away the memory of an apparently overbearing bully and the relentless chants `hey hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today' during Vietnam - now I am aware of a supremely astute and crafty political operator - someone who could actually deliver on the rhetoric, a poor boy who finally got his dream and endeavoured to create a country which was genuinely for the people, all the people. The overbearing bully is there, and none of Johnson's flaws are glossed over, but Caro, buttressed by years of painstaking and exhaustive research, shows us the man who was prepared to take on what he was told were lost causes, because, as he said `Well, what the hell's the presidency for?' And that is what this book is all about, as Caro says in the final paragraph of his introduction: `...the story of Lyndon Johnson during the opening, transition, weeks of his presidency is a triumphant story, one in which it is possible to glimpse the full possibilities of presidential power - of that power exercised by a master in the use of power - in a way that is visible at only a few times in American history.' The Kennedy men had the Harvard brains, but not the political nous. This is a book everyone should read, and it is uncomfortable reading because it makes us confront hows how ideals can almost certainly only be realised by a readiness to wheel and deal, a willingness perhaps to let principles slide, the necessity of working within moral grey areas - it should be gift-wrapped and presented to every new leader of men wherever they may be.

As with earlier volumes in the series almost a decade in the making, and while outstanding in itself, it is possible that The Passage of Power finds Robert Caro just slightly flagging in his efforts to complete his coverage of Lyndon Johnson's life.Volume 3 Master of the Senate was such a strong book (and indeed Volume 2, Means of Ascent, such a vivid tale of human grappling) that the fourth book falls perhaps a few notches short, yes bringing a very effective and haunting account of Kennedy's assassination and Johnson's tiptoeing into the physical White House only several days later, yet - not quite reaching Caro's earlier highs.That said, the torture by the Kennedys and their courtiers of their Vice-President prior to 1963 is well covered, as is Johnson's grinding anguish at having allowed himself to be manipulated into such relative powerlessness. This volume however stands and falls on the day of, and days after, the Dallas shooting - an event already so exhaustively analysed and described that perhaps any writer with realism would find the task truly petrifying.That said, anyone who admires the series, and it is an amazing achievement, shall gladly welcome the latest addition.